Sometimes, it's the back-to-basics
strategies that can deliver the most bang for the buck. Just ask Hypertherm, a manufacturer of plasma
metal cutting products. Despite being a leader in its field, the company
launched a well-orchestrated campaign eight years ago to reduce product
development and manufacturing costs while making its products more consistently
reliable. Yet it wasn't rapid prototyping, 3-D simulation or any other
state-of-the-art design tool technology that prepped Hypertherm for its
journey. Rather, a 30-year-old methodology and little-known toolset from a
company called Boothroyd Dewhurst led
Hypertherm on its redesign course, helping the company take a significant chunk
out of its part count and production costs.

As part of its product development
makeover, Hypertherm tasked engineers with factoring cost targets and assembly
strategies into initial design exploration as opposed to relying on
manufacturing to troubleshoot problem areas later on in the cycle when it is
far more costly and time consuming to initiate changes. By integrating
Boothroyd Dewhurst's trademarked Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFMA)
methodology and software into Hypertherm's core product development process,
engineers got a jump on the rigorous and often painstaking exercise of counting
parts and evaluating designs from a manufacturing and assembly standpoint. The
engineering group's adoption of DFMA was essential to helping Hypertherm close
in on its aggressive targets of 50 percent reductions in both part count and
production costs.

"The 'D' in DFMA stands for design
- it's the design engineers that should be doing this work, not manufacturing
and not industrial engineers," says Mike Shipulski, Hypertherm's director of
advanced development. "No matter what your product costs or volumes are, it's
time to take this kind of approach."

Design for the 'ilities'

Pundits in the engineering space
might argue that this kind of approach is long overdue. Design for
manufacturability or design for serviceability are concepts that have been
around for decades, yet engineering teams, including Hypertherm's, have long
struggled with how to establish the processes and gather the proper information
to give the methodologies their due. "The whole design for the `ilities' has
been around for a long time - it's how engineers go about (the process) that's
evolving and changing," says Ken Amann, director of research for CIMdata. "Lots of companies have looked at
it for a long time and thought it's too complex or too expensive."

Boothroyd Dewhurst has been
fighting that perception for years, according to President John Gilligan. The
methodology and the software helps estimate the difficulty of assembly, works
to eliminate unnecessary parts and assembly tooling, and facilitates analysis
and comparison of the costs of different materials and manufacturing methods in
the design stage, leading engineering groups to create product designs that are
"lean from the start," Gilligan says. Fortune 1000 companies like John Deere,
Harley Davidson and smaller firms like Hypertherm have leveraged DFMA over the
years to achieve laudable results, including cost reductions of 50 percent,
shortened product development cycles in the neighborhood of 45 percent and part
count decreases of nearly half. Despite the magnitude of the improvements,
Gilligan admits the methodology is still a tough sell as many companies remain
skeptical about the outcomes and are less inclined to commit the time and
resources for learning what is admittedly a complex discipline.

"Most companies are pushing to get
product to market and if they're spending extra time, they're spending it on
making the product look pretty - not on making it easy to manufacture and
assemble," says Gilligan. In many cases, companies are committing that time and
money to efforts such as lean manufacturing to inject efficiencies and take
cost out of the product development equation. "There's a lot of effort on lean
manufacturing to improve the whole process, but with that, you're really only
making minor tweaks to the real problems that were introduced back at the
design stage."

The other main issue is there
isn't a well-defined category of tools to take engineering teams on this
journey. While Boothroyd counts cost-estimating software among its competition,
Gilligan says it's not really an apples to apples comparison since those tools
are often more geared for manufacturing engineers - not design engineers. The
other major differentiator of DFMA is that it combines cost estimating with
product simplification - an area that the other tools don't support and where
companies typically see the most compelling results. More so than other
software tools, Gilligan says Boothroyd's main competition is consultants, who
apply their own skills and knowledge of product design and assembly and
manufacturing to redesign products on a project-by-project basis. "It's the
difference between fishing versus teaching you how to fish," he says. "Once a
consultant leaves, their capabilities leave. They're not teaching you how to
improve the products on your own."

Along with consultants and the
Boothroyd Dewhurst offering, PLM suites are also starting to add some elements
to address design for assembly and manufacturing concerns, putting the
information in a usable context and making it widely accessible across
different functional areas of the business. In that vein, integration with
mainstream product development platforms is another barrier for the Boothroyd
DFMA approach, according to CIMdata's Amann. "People are still trying to figure
out, does this really work and how does it fit in," he explains. "Boothroyd
hasn't done a great job tying into other parts of the PLM world - it's been
more like a standalone thing."

DFMA at Work

Nevertheless, companies like Hypertherm are seeing some
pretty dramatic improvements simply by leveraging this standalone tool set.
Hypertherm engineers now routinely perform DFMA as a standard part of the
design process and they view the goal of parts reduction and design for
assembly as their responsibility, not the domain of manufacturing. While the
company started out small, deploying DFMA on individual projects typically to
create a baseline for product redesigns, the tool is now regularly deployed on
new designs as well. "We're actually now building two different alpha
prototypes of our next product all to help manufacturing determine which is
easier to assemble," says Peter Brahan, Hypertherm's business team leader,
automation. "Before, we never would have spent the time or money to do that."

Using the DFMA software, engineers evaluate an individual
product part by part in addition to documenting the assembly process step by
step. The software helps generate three key Pareto charts (cost, part count and
assembly time) which establishes a baseline that allows the team to measure its
success, not to mention, identify the parts and processes where there is the
greatest opportunity for improvement.

Using the tool has vastly changed the interaction between
manufacturing and engineering. "The teams always worked together, but they were
not closely tied in the design process - mostly in the troubleshooting process
when the product was in production," Brahan says.

ITT Control Technologies
was a big promoter of lean manufacturing as a means of taking waste out of the
product development process. Then came DFMA. David Vranson, advanced
manufacturing engineer for ITT's Aerospace Controls division, has been
practicing DFMA principles since the late 1980s and helped convince the company
to buy the Boothroyd Dewhurst software in 2007 to automate what at the time was
mostly a manual calculation process. When individual divisions began using the
tool to improve product designs and eliminate waste, ITT began to see results
that weren't possible with just lean manufacturing principles, Vranson says.
"Nine times out of 10, waste is designed right into the product - it's not
something that occurs when the design gets to the other side," he says. "That's
the benefit of DFMA - you look at a design before it's released (to
manufacturing) and get rid of a lot of waste."

Vranson's group, which designs pressure and flow switches
deployed in aerospace and defense applications and in industrial use, got their
feet wet with the DFMA software by starting with small projects, using what-if
scenarios to examine small areas of a design. Engineers would experiment
putting things together in a different way or integrating parts and utilizing
different construction modes to eliminate parts. Even small gains on individual
assemblies have big ramifications. Consider a valve assembly project where DFMA
analysis took the number of parts down from 33 to less than half. But it wasn't
just the part reduction that was a boon. "We were able to manufacture the valve
assembly twice as fast; it was two times as fast to put together the new design
and we could make twice as many as we could before just by making those changes
to the configuration," Vranson explains.

In fact, ease of assembly is perhaps the biggest benefit of
the DFMA program. "To reduce parts makes it easier to put together and if you
look at what you do across the entire manufacturing enterprise, that's where
you start to see traction," he says.

Beyond scaling the deployment of DFMA, having top management
support of the program is critical to its success. At Whirlpool Corp., company management deemed
DFMA as central to the firm's strategy to be the number one cost leader in all
of its product categories at each of its price points, according to James D.
Bolton, global lead, value engineering and DFMA. Years into the program, DFMA
is now part of the company's staged gate process for product development and is
used equally to redesign existing products as well as to optimize new product
designs.

"The fact that the management team bought into this helped
with a lot of the pushback we got which was typically around time," Bolton
says. "You have to make sure you allocate the right people to the team and be
respectful of their time. You don't want to burn them."

Raymond Corp., a
maker of electric forklift trucks, learned that same lesson early on. The
company has gradually cultivated use of the tool over the years from its
initial role for helping product designs meet target costs and for negotiating
with suppliers, to more recently, as a means to make existing and new designs
more efficient to manufacture.

While it's been hard to capture exact savings realized by
use of the tool, Raymond has saved nearly 20 percent on some of its larger
projects, a result of letting the DFMA tool identify areas of improvement,
according to Matt Miles, Raymond's supplier quality and development engineer.
Today, both manufacturing and engineering are more accepting of DFMA. "We now
have this internal phrase, `did you DFMA it?,'" Miles says. "It's become an
expected part of the design process."

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